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Retractions arrive in case of Edward Erin, British allergist who tried to poison mistress

Good people can make bad researchers, but can bad people make good science?

We’re agnostic on the question, but anyone who thinks the answer is no need look only as far as Edward Erin for validation of that view. An allergy expert in the U.K., Erin was convicted in 2009 of attempting to poison a mistress in an effort to induce an abortion.

Following an investigation by the Imperial College of London, and at the request of a group of the authors (Trevor T. Hansel, M.D.; Andrew Bush, M.D.; Onn Min Kon, M.D.; and Peter J. Barnes, M.D.) the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine has agreed to retract the following articles due to concerns regarding the veracity of the data and the validity of the conclusions:

The first paper listed has been cited an impressive 75 times, according to the Thomson Scientific Web of Knowledge. The second has been cited 8 times.

Erin’s co-author Barnes is a leading allergy researcher who happens also to be an editor of AJRCCM. We emailed him for comment but have yet to receive a reply.

Erin’s name appears on at least 16 articles in Medline, in journals including AJRCCM, CHEST, and Clinical & Experimental Allergy. So far, only the AJRCCM has retracted any of Erin’s work. We have reached out to the editors of these publications to find out whether they intend to do so.

We do have a modest gripe — not a new one — with how the AJRCCM handled the retractions. Like many publications, the journal has put the notice behind its paywall. That doesn’t serve the interests of readers or researchers who might not subscribe to the title. We think all retraction notices, corrections and such should be posted outside these barriers so that access to the material is free for all to see. And while we’re at it, the original abstracts don’t yet include any notation that they’ve been retracted.

I agree with you that readers shouldn’t have to pay to read retraction notices. In fact, the COPE guidelines state this clearly (stating “retraction notices should be freely available to all readers (i.e. not behind access barriers or available only to subscribers)” ) How can we persuade publishers to change this practice?

2018 correction.https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002657
“The PLOS Medicine Editors received comments from readers suggesting that the Western blot demonstrating nuclear translocation of GATA-3 in response to anti-CD3/CD28 stimulation in panel A of Fig 1 was labeled incorrectly. The authors have re-examined the original experimental images and would like to correct Fig 1. Please see the corrected version of panel A in Fig 1 below. The conclusions of the paper are unaffected by this correction.”